The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Friday, November 20, 2015

To my many foreign policy friends, including terrorism experts, tonight is the night to mourn & #standwithfrance. Tomorrow we analyze.--Anne-Marie Slaughter on Twitter, November 13, 2015

I recently characterized the tsunami of analysis about the Paris attacks as a case of Orientalism. What isn't important is what may have happened. What's important is that we control the alien entity: we define the
problem, we dictate the proper response and, natch, we get to declare
victory—or at least what victory would look like if we stopped listening to the
handwringers and had our spooks and soldiers build us an impregnable fortress
of pure gold.

I’m a cui bono
guy to a fault; I’ll admit that.I don’t
give enough weight and legitimacy to emotions and irrationality as drivers for
actions.

And I have to
say I detected a distinct shortage of “bono” to IS in the Paris attacks, unless
the thinking of the leadership runs to “It would be an excellent idea to focus
the fury of the West upon us here in Iraq instead of laying low and letting the
West go along with the GCC/Turkish plan of quagmiring Russia in Syria.”

Doesn’t make
too much sense.Which is why, in my
opinion, is why you see a lot of metaphysical handwaving that the real motive
for the attacks was to erase the Muslim “grey zone”, provoke a fatal
over-reaction from the West, contribute to the agonies of the Syrian refugees
in Europe, rend the time-space continuum and thereby bring the Crusaders to
their knees, etc.

Let me
introduce some interesting factiness on the matter of the alleged mastermind,
Abdelhamid Abaaoud.

Abaaoud was well known as a violent radical miscreant linked to an Islamic
cell in Verviers, Belgium, that did all sorts of mean, murderous crap.

In an article
with the, in retrospect, bitterly ironic title “Second Paris averted by hours”, the Daily Mail reported on a January 2015 raid in Verviers, Belgium, the one Abaaoud famously evaded.

The Belgian terror cell linked to the Islamic State (Isis) group, which was
raided by police overnight, was plotting to either take a passenger bus hostage
or behead a member of Belgian authority such as a policeman or a magistrate,
according to local media reports.

So, he was
going to behead a policeman, or maybe hijack a passenger bus.

After Abaaoud
was linked to the Paris outrage, the Verviers activities were retroactively upgraded to “major
terrorist attack":

Abaaoud was the main target of a major police raid on a terrorist cell in
Verviers, Belgium, in January in which two jihadists were killed. It was
carried out within days of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, though police
said the two events were not linked.

In July he was sentenced to 20 years in absentia along with 32 other
jihadists. The Belgian cell was said to have been planning a major terrorist
attack, including abducting and beheading a prominent law enforcement official
and posting a video of it online.

Police believe Abaaoud helped arrange a
terrorist attack on an Amsterdam to Paris train on August 21, which was
thwarted by four passengers including British businessman Chris Norman. The
French newspaper Liberation claimed he was in contact with Ayoub El-Khazzani,
the man who opened fire in a carriage of the train before he was overwhelmed by
passengers.

The Verviers
cell apparently hung out with the JAN cell at Vilvoorde, Belgium, an indication
perhaps that we are talking about local radicalized Muslims more than the
feared and dreaded sleeper cell staffed by professional jihadis of unknown
provenance, maybe even…masquerading as refugees!

For some
perspective on whether or not attacks of the November outrage in Paris could be
ginned up locally, as opposed to orchestrated out of Raqqa, the January Daily Mail article reminds
us of how the Charlie Hedbo attackers acquired their gear:

Police said earlier this week that automatic weapons and a rocket launcher used in the Charlie Hebdo and Kosher supermarket attacks in Paris were purchased from Belgian gangs.

The Scorpion machine gun and the Tokarev handgun used by Amedy Coulibaly during his attack on the kosher supermarket which resulted in the deaths of four Jewish Parisians came from Brussels and Charleroi.

And the Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers used by the Kouachi brothers to attack the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, killing 12, were purchased by Coulibay near the Gare du Midi in Brussels for less than 4000 English pounds.

Yes, apparently you can go down to the train station in Brussels and purchase a rocket launcher.
So, Abdelhamid
Abaaoud, radicalized Euro-thug of Moroccan descent, or ISIS’s chosen instrument
for the destruction of Western civilization?

The
indispensable first stop is the blog of a Belgian researcher, Pieter van Ostaeyen.He writes about radicalized Belgian
Muslims.Back in January, he had a post
that mentioned Abdelhamid Abaaoud:

It seems fair to state that there is a rather strong connection between an
important part of the Belgian ISIS fighters and the supposedly Libyan brigade
of ISIS.

After the foiled attacks in Verviers in Belgium on January 8, 2015, it
became clear that the main suspect Abdelhamid Abaaoud can be linked directly to
this group. His little brother Younes (aged 14 and hence probably the youngest
foreign fighter in Syria) has been portrayed multiple times in the ranks of
Libyan fighters in Syria.

Van Ostaeyen has a lot of interesting pictures from social media about the “supposedly
Libyan brigade of ISIS”, which goes by the name “Katibat al-Battar al-Libi.”The pictures make fighting in Syria look like
Spring Break for radicalized Islamic bros, with the advantage that you get to
blow things up and kill people, and the disadvantage that people can kill you.

Van Ostaeyen’s most remarkable get is a photograph of a list of martyrs from
the brigade including the names of eight fighters surnamed “el-Belgiki”,
presumably because they were ex-Belgium.That’s about 20% of the fatalities listed.

Van Ostaeyen’s also quoted in a post-Paris NYT backgrounder.It provides an interesting insight on
why Abaaoud might fall in with a Libyan outfit:

Abdelhamid Abaaoud is suspected of
being a leader of a branch of the Islamic State in Syria called Katibat
al-Battar al Libi, which has its origins in Libya. This particular branch has
attracted many Belgian fighters because of language and cultural ties, said
Pieter van Ostaeyen, who tracks Belgian militants.

Many Belgian Muslims are of Moroccan
origin, he said, and speak a dialect found in eastern Morocco that is similar
to a Libyan dialect. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who studies jihadi groups at the
Middle East Forum, a research center in Washington, said there was no evidence
yet that the Paris attacks had been ordered by Adnani or the Islamic State’s
overall leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

But he added that the soldiers at
Libyan branch that includes Abaaoud has played a prominent role in exporting
violence. One of their tasks he said, has been to organize plots that “involved
foreign fighters, sleeper cells in Europe that were connected with an operative
inside of Syria and Iraq, usually in a lower to midlevel position.”

At the end of his January blogpost, van Ostaeyen links to a piece
by Aymenn al-Tamimi (who's also quoted in the Times piece above) on Joshua Landis’
website.You go there and you find a
brief 2014 piece about Katibat al-Battar al-Libi.Not much there:

This group, which has existed at least
since the summer of last year, is the Libyan division of the Islamic State of
Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS), despite false rumours that the battalion had defected
to Jabhat al-Nusra. Libya itself has been a big source of muhajireen in both
Iraq and Syria over the past decade, so the fact that there is a battalion
devoted to recruiting Libyan fighters should come as no surprise. The existence
of Katiba al-Bittar al-Libi as a front group for ISIS perhaps reflects a wider
pro-ISIS trend across central North Africa with the Ansar ash-Shari’a movements
in Tunisia and Libya.

Wandering off into English-language Google, you don’t get a lot of
hits.But you get thisfrom some murky Israeli intel outfit
called “The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center” (points are abridged; go to link for full text):

Within the Arab foreign fighters
there is a hard core of Salafist-jihadi, Al-Qaeda and global jihad
operatives, some of them veterans of thefighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya
and other Islamic combat zones

10. Estimates for the number of
Libyan fighters in Syria varybetween hundreds and almost a
thousand .

11. Some of the fighters who joined
the ranks of the rebels in Syria areLibyan nationals and some are
foreign operatives who fought in Libyaand transferred their activities to
Syria after the fall of the Gaddafi regime..

12. Some of the Libyan fighters went
to Syria and use their combat experience to train and organize the rebels .
They gave them logistic support, teach them how to operate heavy weapons and
manage communications. According to reports, the Libyan fighters operated
training bases and taught the rebels military tactics (Trust.org, August 12,
2012). They also provided humanitarian support and were involved in
transporting weapons into Syria throughout 2013.

13. The fighters come from both
eastern Libya (Benghazi) and western Libya(Tripoli). A significant number come
from the city of Derna, located east of Benghazi, which Muammar Gaddafi called
"an Islamic emirate" because it was a center for Islamic terrorism
during his regime.

14. The Libyans arrive in Syria in
much the same way as the other fighters, usually by air to Turkey (Libyans do
not need visas for Turkey). From Istanbul they fly to Antakya in southern
Turkey and from there they go overland to towns and villages near the
Turkish-Syrian border. They usually receive support from Islamic networks and
sometimes the trip to Syria is paid for by them (Der Spiegel, April 30, 2012).

15. In December 2012 a battalion was
formed of Libyan foreign fighter which exists to this day. It is called the
Katibat al-Battar (The Battalion of the Slicing Sword). It is affiliated with
the ISIS and fights mainly in the regions of Latakia, Deir ez-Zor and Idlib.

Aaron Zelin has some infoin an April 2015 on Libya over at the
Hudson Institute.A footnote about IS
fighters in Libya states:

These are under the command of what
once was called MSSI and is comprised of those Libyans returned from Syria
under the banner of Katibat al-Battar.

Interesting, right?A military
formation that pre-existed its deployment in Syria.And guess what?It even preceded ISIS.

Libyans had already begun traveling to
fight in Syria in 2011, joining existing jihadi factions or starting their own.
In 2012, one group of Libyans in Syria declared the establishment
of the Battar Brigade in a statement laden with anti-Shia sectarianism. The
Battar Brigade founders also thanked “the citizens of Derna,” a city in
northeastern Libya long known as a hotbed of radical Islamism, for their
support for the struggle in Syria.

In the spring of 2014, many Battar
Brigade fighters returned to Libya. In Derna, they reorganized themselves as
the Islamic Youth Shura Council (IYSC). In September, an Islamic State delegation, including
the Yemeni Abu al-Bara al-Azdi and the Saudi Abu Habib al-Jazrawi, arrived in
Libya. After being received by the IYSC, they collected pledges of allegiance
to the Islamic State’s self-appointed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, from
IYSC-aligned fighters in Derna. They then declared eastern Libya to be a
province of the Islamic State, calling it Wilayat Barqa, or the Cyrenaica
Province.

Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, in other words, was formed as a rather bloody
piece of outreach by the local Islamists to share Libya experience in
insurrection and revolution with Syria.After IS arose and became a dominant military and financial force, the "KBL" threw in their lot with ISIS, and members of the brigade subsequently returned to Libya
to establish an IS beachhead.

A July 2015 study by Small Arms Survey which
I cannot recommend highly enough makes the point that foreign fighters, in addition
to accumulating general jihadi merit, were also interested in acquiring skills
they could apply in their own struggles.Moroccans--not just Europeans of Moroccan descent, like Abaaoud, but also, for lack of a better word, Moroccan Moroccans--are a big presence in the jihadi movement. So, in passing, I would recommend thinking twice about the advantages of
a Moroccan vacation timeshare.

The SAR report also
confirms the autonomous character of Katibat al-Battar al-Libi.

While
the uncertain relationship between JAN and IS was being clarified, Libyans
stayed ‘outside’ the fray, remaining in their own units and not integrating
into other IS hierarchies or command structures.In Latakia for instance, Libyans kept
their own separate battalion (The
Daily Star, 2013). As the split between JAN and IS
deepened, Libyans chose IS but remained apart, forming the Katibat al-Battar
al-Libiya (KBL) (The Libyan al-Battar Brigade), under the auspices of IS. Since
its formation, the KBL has been active in eastern Syria, notably in Al Hasakah
and Deir az-Zor. The battalion maintained links with Ansar al-Sharia in Libya,
an early and prominent supporter of IS. Ansar al-Sharia proved to be an
excellent recruiting tool and played a role in the arrival of many Libyans in
Syria prior to 2014.

Washington believes the group is
responsible for the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed the
ambassador and three other Americans.

In November, the United Nations
blacklisted Ansar al-Sharia Benghazi and its sister group, Ansar al-Sharia
Derna, over links to Al-Qaeda and for running camps for the Islamist State
group.

So there you
have it.The Paris outrage made in
Libya.Not Syria.Brought to us by the people who killed Christopher
Stevens in Benghazi.

I am sure that
Hillary Clinton is grateful to the French police for botching the raid to
capture Abaaoud and pumping 5000 rounds into his apartment instead of capturing
him; otherwise, he might have become a lively topic of interest and curiosity and
the right wing could have cooked off the Benghazi! munitions through election day.

To sum up: the alleged
and now reportedly deceased architect of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud,
did not fight “for IS”.He fought "with"
Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, an outfit whose presence in Syria predates that of
ISIS.Even after Katibat al-Battar
al-Libi decided to pledge allegiance to ISIS, it retained its independent
identity.It is possible that Abaaoud
was acting under orders from al-Baghdadi to commit the Paris outrage.But he might have been an angry guy
with the skills, resources, and inclination to commit mass murder on his own kick.And the police were already after him big time after
the Verviers raid in January (we are now told that Abaaoud was “on” or a “candidate
for” a spot on the drone assassination assignment list, but I wonder if this is
post-hoc ass-covering).So maybe he and
his friends decided to pull the pin, and go out in a big way.

I doubt we'll ever get the full story. But "Paris: Made in Libya" is an honest hook.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

When the US
destroyer USS Lassen finally executed
its Freedom of Navigation sailthrough a.k.a. “The FONOP” within 12 miles of
Subi Reef on October 27, the China hawks were ecstatic.

John Garnaut
exulted that the United States had bested the PRC in a “seminal test of
wills”.On his Twitter feed plugging his
piece he speculated that revealing the PLA Navy as a paper porpoise might
encourage a rethink on Taiwan:

I wonder about the big prize, Taiwan,
now the U.S. has finally called China's bluff over its fake islands

John Garnaut added, China's great
wall of sand is theatrical bluster
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/chinas-great-wall-of-sand-is-theatrical-bluster-20151028-gkksbt.html …
by @jgarnaut

The thinking here,
presumably, is that the FONOP revealed the PRC would back down in any
confrontation with resolutely brandished US military force, so the DPP could
and should explore those Taiwan-independence scenarios without excessive concern
that the PRC is really going to try to fight its way past the US 7th
Fleet.

Unfortunately, the
assumption that the United States had successfully defied the PRC’s red line in
the SCS is a misconception born of some magical combination of goalpost shifting,
misunderstanding, and wishful thinking.

Because there was no
red line.

The PRC repeatedly
declared it would frown upon, indeed not “condone” a US Navy sailthrough that
disregarded the (extremely murky) Chinese position on the inviolability of nearshore
waters of its faux islands project.

However, it never
said it wouldn’t allow it.

The PRC current position
is that the US, as befits the world’s only hyperpower, gets to sail where it
wants whether the PRC likes it or not.And as long as the keystone of the PLAN’s power projection is a
converted casino with balky engines masquerading as an aircraft carrier, that’s
how it’s going to be.

In any case, the
defiant posture of China hawks was deflated by the revelation that the Lassen sailthrough fell under the
heading of “innocent passage” i.e. an internationally-accepted hustling of a
military vessel from Point A to Point B through some other country’s seas for
purposes of transit only (though “hustling” is something of a misnomer here;
the Lassen apparently engaged in a
“lingering” passage of several hours).

Indeed, the US action
appeared to recapitulate a Chinese naval flotilla’s “innocent passage”
sailthrough of US waters in the Aleutians in September.

In order for the Lassen operation to openly repudiate any
PRC claims to territorial water rights, it would have had to engage in military
operations deemed unacceptable in other countries’ territorial waters: turn on
attack its attack radars, perhaps, or launch a drone or a helicopter, maybe
drop some sensors.

But that didn’t
happen, to the chagrin of proponents of the “FONOP”.Via twitter, from the feed of an analyst who
watches the issue closely:

Pentagon/WH
needs to set record straight ASAP on unattributed statements Lassen engaged in
innocent passage near Subi. Huge blunder if true.

But
it was true!Either through leaks of
disgruntled hawks or background briefings by the White House to the Financial
Times the story came out.

The revelations shrank the mighty FONOP to the puny dimensions
of an “innocent passage” sailthrough.

According to five people familiar
with the operation, the USS Lassen conducted what is known under international
law as innocent passage when it sailed within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef,
which could leave the legal significance of the US manoeuvre open to different
interpretations.

But that decision angered many Pentagon and Navy officials
who think the US should adopt a more forceful stance.

“It makes the [Obama] administration look weak externally
and internally divided,” said Euan Graham, director of the international
security programme at the Lowy Institute in Australia.

…

Some critics suggested that the US operation was no
different from when several Chinese warships recently made an innocent passage
through waters surrounding the Aleutian Islands off the Alaska coast.

Mr Graham said that while most countries in the region were
relieved when the US conducted the Subi operation, a “sense of anticlimax”…

Insert sad trombone sound here.

As befits the underpopulated
insignificance of these small atolls in a rather large sea, it is very
difficult to figure out what is actually going on there.And it would not be beyond the cupidity of
various participants to make stuff up.

The administration could just as
easily have leaked disinfo that the Lassen
had defiantly dropped some sonobuoys and recorded the cries of polyps
groaning under the oppression of the Red landfill, and thereby mollified the
China hawk quadrant.Instead, the shortcomings
of the FONOP were gracelessly and callously revealed.

If the info came courtesy of FONOP fans in order to embarrass the White House, it's another indication of the borderline
insubordination of the Pentagon hawks on the SCS issue and their inclination to try
to drive policy execution their way through leaks to the press.

There is another possibility: that
the Obama administration was willing to advertise its FONOP dysfunction through
backgrounders by not one, not two, but five insiders.

In terms of the White House, there
are, I think, a few things at work.

One, obviously, is that President
Obama is not too interested in rocking the boat with China right now, what with
climate change, cyber, & whatnot on the agenda.

Second, and perhaps less obviously,
I suspect President Obama is not too interested in creating additional
headaches for himself as he winds down his second term.The “innocent passage” FONOP threw a bone to
the China hawks at home and abroad, but leaves it up to the next president,
presumably Hillary Clinton, the creatrix of the pivot, to decide on the
frequency and intensity of these operations over the long term.

Third, and my personal favorite, is
perhaps President Obama also shares my opinion that the whole “confront the PRC
in the SCS” strategy is stupid.

The obvious PRC riposte to enhanced
US and ally presence in the SCS is not to resist prematurely; it is to
massively muscle up the PRC military presence, not on the exposed islands, but
in the Paracels, Hainan, and on the adjacent mainland.

And that’s what’s happening.

The PRC just deployed J11 fighters
to Woody Island in the Paracels, recently completed its aircraft carrier dock
at Sanya on Hainan Island (700 meters; big enough for 2 carriers!), and is
certainly looking at studding the coast with ship-killing missiles.

Considering the PRC’s geographic and
marginal cost advantages in militarizing its backyard vs. the sizable expense
of power projection enhancement into the SCS from outside, I leave it to
interested strategists to decide whether sustained military superiority by the
U.S., Japan, and their allies in the SCS via the pivot is something really
worth betting on…

…even if the US is able to return to
Subic Bay in the Philippines and/or Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, prospects that
certainly make the Navy’s heart go pitty-pat.

It seems inevitable that eventually
the South China Sea will look as inhospitable as the Taiwan Strait, and a
confrontation with the PRC over the SCS will require attacks to neutralize PLA
capabilities inside PRC sovereign territory, a replay of the AirSeaBattle total
war scenario that undoubtedly has fans among the Apocalypse Now! crowd but
gives other people the heebie-jeebies.

The FONOP program didn’t start this
process; but it’s safe to say that it will accelerate the PRC’s militarization
of the SCS and move up the day when the PRC finally decides it really is able
to circumscribe the activities of the US Navy.

For what it’s worth, I think the
South China Sea is not a flashpoint for World War III; instead I see it as the
golden trough where PRC, US, Philippine, and Vietnamese militaries expect to
glut themselves for a generation.

Here’s hoping I’m right!

And if the PRC does
finally issue an ultimatum to the United States on the activities of the US
Navy in the seas surrounding China, here’s hoping we won’t be around to see
it.Because the PRC will only issue that
ultimatum when it’s confident of prevailing, not against the cautious US
civilian leadership, but against the China hawks in the US milsec
quadrant.

I suggest a useful if
not exclusive metric is the carrier race in the West Pacific.The US is shifting the focus of its carrier
operations at San Diego westward to support the activities of the Japan-based
Seventh Fleet; the PRC is pushing ahead with construction of its first
domestically-born carrier with more undoubtedly to come; and Japan is pushing
out two ships that masquerade as helicopter carriers but can quickly be
converted into conventional aircraft carriers.

If and when the PRC
has more aircraft carriers and overall lethal tonnage in the regional seas than
the aggregate of the US, Japan, and any other local ally that wants to pitch
in, that’s when we can expect a hard PRC challenge to the potency of the US
Navy.